Hostile aliens, by Terry Mejdrich
Hostile aliens, by Terry Mejdrich
In the news: Scientists predict there are four hostile alien civilizations in our galaxy that would take over Earth if they had the opportunity. But before anyone should panic, we are overwhelmingly more likely to get hit with a doomsday asteroid, or a massive solar flare, or even suffer our own self-destruction. And this latest prediction comes with its own bias, though possibly an accurate one.
This study extrapolates alien behavior from human behavior. It assumes alien behavior would be the same, with the same motivations and desires, as people. In other words if people would do it, then aliens would as well.
If we consider the past history of human expansion, it has never ended well for those cultures confronted with superior technology. As an example, Europeans expanded around the globe decimating native peoples. There has never been any major human expansion for any altruist reason; it has always been to exploit resources or to expand the ‘motherland’ or to impose one culture upon another. So the predictions made by the scientists assume that the same kinds of thoughts would drive other, off world, civilizations.
Is this assumption reasonable? It is, unless alien life is bizarrely different from life as we understand it to be. Nearly the entire evolutionary history of complex life on Earth has been based on competition within and between species and the predator-prey dynamic and adaptability to the changing environment. The very first and simplest life forms obtained energy (food) from non-biological sources. The descendants of most of those life forms exist yet today. But somewhere around a billion years ago, more or less, things got brutal when certain organisms evolved the capacity to consume other organisms for energy. And then they never looked back.
During a geologic age called the Cambrian Explosion approximately 540 million years ago, evolution kicked into overdrive with a plethora of evolving kinds of complex life. This evolutionary explosion in species and diversity was driven by the exploitive nature of these new living organisms. If life had not the ability to change or if the environmental conditions on Earth had prevented it, life never would have progressed past the first basic life forms. In other words, we are a product of the ‘survival of the fittest’ paradigm. The thought experiment listed above assumes that any sufficiently advanced alien species would have followed a similar path, and so have the same self-centered and expansionist tendencies.
Suppose scientists discovered a planet around another star that had all the characteristics of a livable world. (The recently launched and operational James Webb Space Telescope will have the capacity to discover at least some of those characteristics.) Further suppose conditions on Earth had become difficult for any number of possible reasons from a natural calamity, or nuclear war, to environmental degradation, uncontrollable climate change, an unsustainable human population, and others; the new world would be a tempting target for expansion and possibly even insure humanities survival. So ‘generational’ spacecraft set out but when humans arrive there they discover the planet is inhabited by beings only at the beginning of the technological age. They attempt to defend their home but their weapons are no match for our own and soon are decimated. So at that point we could raise the number of possible invading alien civilizations to five.
Based on human history and indeed the entire history of complex life on Earth, there is no reason to believe alien beings arriving at Earth would have anything other than expansionist and exploitive motivations. By our example, the science fiction depictions of enlightened and peaceful aliens is, well, pure science fiction. And for those stories where humans fight off invading aliens, well that is pure wishful thinking and fantasy. Any alien civilization capable of traveling the vast distances between stars would have technology so far beyond human capability as to be like the U.S. Air force subduing a tribe of apes.
`Well maybe they are just curious creatures accumulating new knowledge. If that were their intent, there would be no need to come in person or make direct contact as even our own technology will soon be able to ascertain the characteristics of thousands of exo-planets from the comfort of our own back yard.
On a positive note, the four predicted hostile civilizations is nothing more than a guess. There could be four or four hundred or four thousand or none at all except for the one we know about. The human civilization. Scientists have discovered thousands of planets around other stars, yet to date have not detected any other sign of intelligent life. Yet the number of planets in the entire Milky Way galaxy could well number more than a hundred billion, so scientists have barely scratched the surface. But if aliens arrive and want to swap a few marvelous curiosities for, say, Long Island, it would be wise to consider that they have an ulterior motive.
In the news: Scientists predict there are four hostile alien civilizations in our galaxy that would take over Earth if they had the opportunity. But before anyone should panic, we are overwhelmingly more likely to get hit with a doomsday asteroid, or a massive solar flare, or even suffer our own self-destruction. And this latest prediction comes with its own bias, though possibly an accurate one.
This study extrapolates alien behavior from human behavior. It assumes alien behavior would be the same, with the same motivations and desires, as people. In other words if people would do it, then aliens would as well.
If we consider the past history of human expansion, it has never ended well for those cultures confronted with superior technology. As an example, Europeans expanded around the globe decimating native peoples. There has never been any major human expansion for any altruist reason; it has always been to exploit resources or to expand the ‘motherland’ or to impose one culture upon another. So the predictions made by the scientists assume that the same kinds of thoughts would drive other, off world, civilizations.
Is this assumption reasonable? It is, unless alien life is bizarrely different from life as we understand it to be. Nearly the entire evolutionary history of complex life on Earth has been based on competition within and between species and the predator-prey dynamic and adaptability to the changing environment. The very first and simplest life forms obtained energy (food) from non-biological sources. The descendants of most of those life forms exist yet today. But somewhere around a billion years ago, more or less, things got brutal when certain organisms evolved the capacity to consume other organisms for energy. And then they never looked back.
During a geologic age called the Cambrian Explosion approximately 540 million years ago, evolution kicked into overdrive with a plethora of evolving kinds of complex life. This evolutionary explosion in species and diversity was driven by the exploitive nature of these new living organisms. If life had not the ability to change or if the environmental conditions on Earth had prevented it, life never would have progressed past the first basic life forms. In other words, we are a product of the ‘survival of the fittest’ paradigm. The thought experiment listed above assumes that any sufficiently advanced alien species would have followed a similar path, and so have the same self-centered and expansionist tendencies.
Suppose scientists discovered a planet around another star that had all the characteristics of a livable world. (The recently launched and operational James Webb Space Telescope will have the capacity to discover at least some of those characteristics.) Further suppose conditions on Earth had become difficult for any number of possible reasons from a natural calamity, or nuclear war, to environmental degradation, uncontrollable climate change, an unsustainable human population, and others; the new world would be a tempting target for expansion and possibly even insure humanities survival. So ‘generational’ spacecraft set out but when humans arrive there they discover the planet is inhabited by beings only at the beginning of the technological age. They attempt to defend their home but their weapons are no match for our own and soon are decimated. So at that point we could raise the number of possible invading alien civilizations to five.
Based on human history and indeed the entire history of complex life on Earth, there is no reason to believe alien beings arriving at Earth would have anything other than expansionist and exploitive motivations. By our example, the science fiction depictions of enlightened and peaceful aliens is, well, pure science fiction. And for those stories where humans fight off invading aliens, well that is pure wishful thinking and fantasy. Any alien civilization capable of traveling the vast distances between stars would have technology so far beyond human capability as to be like the U.S. Air force subduing a tribe of apes.
`Well maybe they are just curious creatures accumulating new knowledge. If that were their intent, there would be no need to come in person or make direct contact as even our own technology will soon be able to ascertain the characteristics of thousands of exo-planets from the comfort of our own back yard.
On a positive note, the four predicted hostile civilizations is nothing more than a guess. There could be four or four hundred or four thousand or none at all except for the one we know about. The human civilization. Scientists have discovered thousands of planets around other stars, yet to date have not detected any other sign of intelligent life. Yet the number of planets in the entire Milky Way galaxy could well number more than a hundred billion, so scientists have barely scratched the surface. But if aliens arrive and want to swap a few marvelous curiosities for, say, Long Island, it would be wise to consider that they have an ulterior motive.
61-69, M
